Angelhair

In the redcoat she (who is I) was

an angel, dark and bright.

Mama chose the drama:

pretty scarlet to subdue the white

walk, a world dumb with snow,

patentleather shoes to shine

the path over ice. My

father paid the way.

His teeth salt inside the grin.

I (who’s she) had a manner

of leaping toward a light

suddenly running into ecstasy

or heat, exquisitely blind

in the body racing inside it-

self. A little fit of imagining.

Thin arms, cropped wings,

to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing-

ing, sisters and brothers itching,

happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat

hair split six ways and brushed into the skin

to itch and itch again.

We were wild and giddy with gifts.

It was then and always as all souls itch and spin

in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein,

so we spin in O, to someone who loves us

and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror,

quiet as ice, we fall all through at last

here in memory’s tiny Paradise.

Source: And All These Roads Be Luminous (TriQuarterly Books, 1998)